Report on L.A. city homelessness plan gives a sobering picture of the struggle ahead

An encampment of homeless people along 6th Street on skid row this week.Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

Nine months after the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted a comprehensive plan to end homelessness, the first progress report on the plan, released this week, offered a sobering picture of the long and difficult path ahead.

Proposals for storage lockers and toilets for street dwellers are stalled, new shelter capacity is being added at a trickle, and the city bureaucracy moving more slowly than some council members had expected.

“I don’t get that. There’s so much red tape and process in that, ” Councilman Michael Bonin said of an item in the report citing a study of shared housing. “If there are beds available today, I would like us to be moving on it.”

Voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved Proposition HHH, a bond proposal the City Council placed on the ballot to authorize $1.2 billion in borrowing for homeless housing. The bond program, however, is the long-range element of the plan.

Among its 64 strategies, many involved procedural changes whose effects will be hard to measure. Among them are a “contact card” for police to get homeless people into the services system, training of outreach workers to serve jail inmates and a request for proposals to improve the homeless database system.